Life Is Elsewhere
“A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism…Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust.”
Time
""I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era."" - Boston Globe
""A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism… Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust.""- Time
Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry.
Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent (""innocence with its bloody smile""!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.
Praise